


Liminal

by aces



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-05-25
Updated: 2005-05-25
Packaged: 2020-10-18 16:02:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20641868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: For the first time in almost ten years of gate travel, Daniel Jackson is aware.





	Liminal

The very first plane ride he remembers is to Chicago.

He remembers wriggling in his seat, trying to see as much out of the window as he can, curiosity and an unbearable excitement making it impossible for him to sit still. His father is lecturing him, telling him to behave, and his mother is trying to snag down a stewardess for a pillow and blanket.

“Okay, Danny,” his father sighs, “sit _still_. We’re going to lift off soon.”

At that, he quiets, fidgeting only with his toes and fingers, staring straight ahead at the seat in front of him. He doesn’t remember any flights previous to this one, but here, in this memory, he is aware of what takeoff means, and it’s as exciting as any excavation site his parents have taken him to.

He feels the engines rev, the tug as the plane backs away from the terminal and taxis around its prescribed channels, finally building up speed. At last, at last, the moment when the plane lifts into the air, the drop in his stomach and the jump in his heart.

He giggles, a joyous sound that can’t help bubbling out of him, as they fly impossibly through the air.

*

He is not aware for an instant.

For the briefest nanosecond, the tiniest increment, the smallest moment, it is as if he has fallen asleep, into the deepest sleep in the night (or day, depending on your sleep cycle and how long it’s been since you last slept before a translation was due) when you’re not aware of anything at all. One moment he was hesitantly pressing at the event horizon with a finger, pushing his face through, the next—nothing at all.

And then he’s thrown out of the circle of glowing water on the other side of the galaxy, and he’s aware of cold and the desperate desire—no, necessity—to be sick all over the floor.

At least, he thinks to himself numbly, he doesn’t feel like sneezing anymore.

*

He feels as if his body is stretched thin, stretched to fill the room, and suddenly he feels every individual molecule that makes up his body and how they all fit together into some kind of massive (relatively speaking) constituent whole—and every molecule is on fire.

He is screaming silently, and no one can hear.

And then he feels something rip loose, as if he has been split in two. And he is falling up, floating away, so boneless he’s not sure he can keep his own _soul_ together.

That’s when he thinks, _Look down_, and does, and sees (without having eyes) his own body lying on a bed connected to a monitor that says his heart is no longer beating. It is surrounded by upright bodies, and he can see the energy zinging inside them all, rushing from one end of their bodies to the other.

But not in his body.

His body is an empty shell of flesh and bone, and he is inexorably being torn away from it.

He would scream again, but he no longer remembers how to.

*

Aware.

In that split moment between one planet and another, between one existence and another, when his molecules are stripped down to their very essences and before they are reassembled in a reassuringly familiar pattern of his self on the other side, he is aware.

The wormhole stretches long and thin across the interplanetary distances, or maybe it cuts a hole through them like a worm burrowing to the center of an apple, or perhaps this is all just imaginary sensory stimuli presented by his brain in a pathetic attempt to understand what the hell his body is going through.

For the first time in almost ten years of gate travel, Daniel Jackson is aware.

And somewhere, a little three-year-old is giggling madly as his stomach pushes _down_ and his heart leaps _up_ in the moment of takeoff.


End file.
